 Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Melody, Julian, Nikki, and Mark to the stage. Thank you. Well, good evening, everyone. It's wonderful to be here with you. I mean, you never expect someone to say, oh, I'm really miserable to be here with you. But it is indeed wonderful. And I am really excited about this panel. These are friends. But even more than that, for tonight's purposes, these are experts who have so much to say on our topic. And we don't have a lot of time to say it, so I'm going to dive right in. I want to start by just talking about the great society. And whether we know the great society has its fans, it has its detractors. But no matter what you think about the policy, whether you love Medicare or you hate Medicaid, no matter where you are on that, I think people have to admit that Lyndon Baines Johnson got an enormous amount done. He is the gold standard when it comes to productivity and effectiveness. And I want to start by talking about that. And I think, Mark, I want to start with you and ask, was it his personality and his style that allowed that to happen and to the degree it was or how much was that a factor in his effectiveness? First of all, good evening. It's great to be here. It's his personality and his style and his knowledge of power and his understanding of where power rests. He was a student of power. He knew how to get things done from an early age. He had gone to Congress in 1931. He had studied its ways and means. He had amassed power through the ages. And by the time that he got to the White House, he had known so many of the players, certainly who were still in Congress, but throughout Washington. And so the way that he wielded that power and could call on people whenever he needed them, his thirst for knowledge was insatiable. He was smart as a whip. He remembered things. He had the White House tapes to remind him of things he didn't remember as well and that helped him out. But he was relentless in his ability to pursue his goals, not only the legislative goals, but making sure that people did what he wanted them to do. And if you listen to the tapes, you can hear him, for instance, berating Sergeant Shriver to get him to become the director of the war on poverty. He was a bull. And he did not take no for an answer. And so this was a guy whose personality, I think, was extremely important to his effectiveness. But his history of working in Washington, of knowing its ways and means, was also indispensable. And I want to build on that, because often people talk about the personality and the style, the Johnson treatment. And there's a great picture of him bearing down on people as the main way that he got things done. But it was a factor. But Julie and I want to come to you and ask you about this moment that was the 1960s and how that factored into his ability to achieve the things that he did. Yeah, I mean, it's great to be here and thank you. And the moment is important. I think Johnson was an incredibly effective politician. And it's part of the reason we look back to him in an age of dysfunction. He was also very experienced. But there was more than Johnson that explains the great society. And I think two big things happen in the mid-1960s that are very important to propelling the great society. One has to do with the election of 1964, which we cannot underestimate. It creates huge, not just democratic majorities, but it shifts the balance to liberal Democrats, as opposed to many of the Southern Democrats. And a lot of the freshman liberal Democrats come in, and they are ready to move on issues like Medicare and voting rights. And that election is also important because of Barry Goldwater. And the results discredit a kind of right-wing conservatism at the time that helps Johnson have what looks like a mandate. And the second big factor is the civil rights movement. And all the movements connected to civil rights, including organized labor. But I think we shouldn't underestimate the importance of the pressure they are putting on members of Congress, including in places like the Midwest. Unions with Medicare are essential to driving that legislation. And so it's not simply a question of how good was Johnson, a key question, but why then did his skills work and why was he able to use them so effectively? And for me, those are two big parts of that 1960s moment. So we've got this moment. We've got the movement. We've got the majorities. We've got the personality. We've got the style. We've got the knowledge and the skill. But, Nikki, all of that we know doesn't necessarily mean that your opposition drops away. And yet, I want you to help us understand what was going on in the GOP at that time. I mean, what was the level of pushback? And why weren't they more successful? Why didn't they push even harder to prevent Johnson at that moment? We're going to come back later and talk about the later years. But at that moment, to try and prevent him from doing things that they thought were anathema to American democracy. Well, part of the issue was that there were a number of Republicans who were on Johnson's side. He had relied on Republicans for his margin of victory on things like the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act because there were a number of moderate and liberal Republicans who were on board with some of the great society programs. There were those conservative Republicans who were definitely not on board. But as Julian was just describing, they had been defeated so soundly in the 1964 election. Johnson was so popular that it takes them a little while to kind of figure out, what do we do next? So you have some conservative Republicans who are like, well, if this is what the American people want, they want something like the great society, maybe we can give them a watered down, more conservative version of that, like a kind of good society that has a little less government at the wheel. And so they trot out programs like elder care, which was a form of what would become Medicare. But it just had a lot less funding, a lot less government involvement. Basically, the government was subsidizing premiums from private health care companies instead of setting up this big engine of government aid. Yeah, look at Medicare Light. And eventually, conservatives are like, that's not what we should be doing. We oppose this kind of government involvement. But it takes them several years. And it really takes a kind of turn in public opinion against some of the great society programs for them to really gain traction in opposing the great society. And we're going to come back to that and talk about the rise in a new conservatism in just a minute. But if we started at the beginning and this bold set of programs that fall under the great society header. But after 1965, Johnson starts to lose momentum. And I wonder if you can talk about what were the contributing factors in that. And I think I want to start with you, Mark, in specifically thinking about the role that the war in Vietnam was playing. And it wasn't Johnson's war to start, but the way that he contributed to the escalation and what that meant for his ability to get things done. Very much so. I think that one of the great developments in our understanding of Johnson, writ large, but certainly for Vietnam, comes through these White House tapes. And you can't say that Lyndon Johnson was a war monitor on Vietnam anymore. Because you can hear him wrestling with it in 1964. We're not even into 1965. We know that in 1964, he simply wants to get to November without having to escalate in Vietnam and freak the country out. But in 1964, he still has his doubts. It is Kennedy's war, right? It's a liberal war fought by the Democratic presidents initially. And Johnson is there from the beginning. Goes over in May 61. He's supportive of the effort at stopping communism in Southeast Asia. But like Kennedy, he's skeptical about the ability to prevail in the kind of maximal sense that they had wanted. So there's this tension between wondering whether we can win, wondering whether it's worth it, and at the same time feeling like, well, we still have to go forward. And so once Johnson is able to kind of put Vietnam to the side in 1964, which he's able to do because he does respond after the incidents in the Tonkin Gulf in August of 1964, not only does he get the Tonkin Gulf resolution, which gives him effectively a blank check to do whatever he needs to do to protect American interests, but he launches airstrikes on North Vietnam the first time that had happened. So then he's able to get to November. And at that point, the decisions are finally made. And there are some arguments to whether or not he was clearly moving in that direction before that he's going to need to take sterner measures. And by 1965, he is doing that. And even at the point where they're launching these tit for tat raids against North Vietnamese assets, when he lands the Marines as he says to Richard Russell, oh, the Marines are going in. We know what that means. All the mothers are going to freak out. He still feels that he has no choice but to do it. And so Johnson recognizes the danger that this is going to put him in, particularly with the Republicans, because if he continues to have these doubts and pulls back, well, Dirksen's not going to give him another dollar for the war on poverty. So there are domestic political concerns relating to the Democrats and their standing, or they're not going to be the party that stands up to communism. But there are personal credibility concerns as well. And Johnson has a long history of feeling insecure, even humiliated at times, particularly at the hands of the Kennedys. And there is that dimension of personal credibility. I'm not going to be the president that ran out on Vietnam that weighs on him as well. So try as he might to hold it at bay. He recognizes that he himself needs to go forward, but he also understands the impact that it's going to have on the great society. And it's interesting, you were talking a few minutes ago about the style and the power and the use of power and the dominance. And also, this is a person who you just described as having these insecurities and fears that also help drive him. Before we go on with any more questions, you've twice referenced the tapes. And I just want to make sure that everyone here understands what you're referring to. Can you just take a second and talk about these tapes? Sure. President Johnson taped roughly 650 hours of material while he was on the telephone. He had previously taped during his political career, but that regimen amped up once he became president. And we not only have all those hours of telephone tape, but there are also roughly 150 hours of meeting tape and some hours of vice presidential tape, which we're very interested in listening to. And they provide a window into Johnson's use of power, into his use of people, into his command of policy, into the whole Johnson treatment that we can all listen to. And when they became available, thanks to the Johnson Library and particularly Lady Bird Johnson, who made sure that they become public, even though LBJ himself was reluctant for them to be aired within 50 years of his death, they've changed our understanding of the man. You can't call him a warm auger on Vietnam anymore. You can't say that he was a cynical opportunist with respect to civil rights anymore. When you hear him speak about those issues. So it's an extraordinary window onto his understanding of policy, his use of power, and on the presidency itself. They are fascinating. We have one fellow essayist who says that she has her family listening to the tapes at Thanksgiving. So just everybody keep that in mind. Holidays are coming. Julian, I want to come back to you and talking about the loss of momentum. And I'm curious, when we look at civil rights, do you think that the backlash was inevitable, that the focus and attention that Johnson was able to give civil rights led to the ultimate backlash that in some ways helped to create the slow down momentum that he had after the Voting Rights Act was passed? Well, I think of it, so I'm not going to give an easy yes or no. I mean, the first thing I think of with that question, and you know this better than anyone, is the windows for doing big things for any president is very limited. And we have a kind of notion that you have all four years, maybe eight years. That's just not the case. It's usually, and Johnson knew this. He talked about it. You have a year and a half, two years before Congress gets you, as he always said. So I think it's important to remember that to start. And obviously after the 1966 midterms, the window literally shuts and it turns to the funding of Vietnam. I think it's not so much a backlash. I mean, it was always there. That opposition to civil rights is fierce. One of the things I write about in the essay for the book is this is something that was part of liberalism in this period. It was built on top of a system of racial segregation that was embedded in the institutions of the country. It was deep in the public culture. And it's not a backlash, but in some ways, the civil rights success is what was the anomaly at the time. So unless that somehow could be sustained indefinitely, I think it was very likely that that opposition was going to be there and be there very strong. That opposition is there as he's passing civil rights. He gets what he can. And the Democratic Congress gets what it can. But it's limited. It doesn't deal with policing. In the end, even the open housing bill is limited in terms of enforcement and in terms of the economy. There's so many issues left off the table. You can see that at the high point, that resistance is there. And many Southern Democrats are waiting. They're waiting for those midterms, just so they can reassert their authority. So I think it was inevitable, not because it's a backlash, but because it was so deeply rooted in American culture at the time and still to this day. And that's why in some ways that first question of how did you get through that sets it up, I think, in a better way. But this is really just to conclude an important challenge and element of American liberalism. It never really got around, even with those two bills in 64 and 65, this system of race that was woven into the country. Well, and you referenced the fair housing bill. So by the time that came along and also the focus on voting and public accommodations had been so centered on the South, but by that time fair housing comes along, we are now moving to more of the country and into the Midwest. King has also moved in terms of his work to other parts of the country. And all of a sudden, you've got people who were saying, oh yeah, they shouldn't be doing that down there. We're saying, hmm, this is now coming to a neighborhood near me quite literally. Yeah, and it becomes a big part of the politics from 66 to 68 when this bill passes. But the bill that passes A, it lacks a lot of what was originally in it in terms of enforcement. And it only passes after King's assassination. So once again, it's not simply the savvy of the president and the legislator, but it's the atmosphere of the moment. But that housing bill and the battle over which goes for two years is quite, it's pretty brutal. It costs legislators like Paul Douglas, one of the liberal lions of the Senate, costs him his seat. The tapes are amazing on this. There's one tape where Senator asks Johnson kind of, why can't he get the legislation through? And I don't have the exact quote, but they say, you're the master of the Senate. And he's like, I'm not the master of a damn thing. The Congress isn't gonna let me do so. So that changes dramatically. And that bill, which is still an achievement obviously, but it's much less than originally envisioned and a very high political cost as those Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans regain their power. Dirksen is no longer on board with this kind of stuff. And all the discussion is about cutting funding for domestic programs. By the time Kerner commission publishes its report, there is zero chance that Lyndon Johnson is gonna be able to get anything in that very important report as legislation. And he's even frustrated by the report as well. Nikki, I wanna come to you here. Julian was just talking about liberalism. And I wanna talk to you about what was happening in terms of the conservative movement and the focus, their critique on the great society and how that kind of put wind in the sails of this conservative movement. Right, because the conservative movement after the cold, or during the Cold War had really been focused on trying to roll back the New Deal. And they were having some problems. And one of the major problems was that people liked the New Deal. These were popular programs. They didn't wanna give up social security. They liked that government was building highways and invested and involved in people's lives. And the emergence of the great society gives them a new target. And in particular, when in the late 1960s there are whole new raft of challenges with rising violent crime rates, with uprisings and protests across the United States with the early days of inflation. Even though those weren't necessarily caused by the great society, they could point to those and say, look what happens when you let government get too big, when you let people get too dependent on government. This is the result. All of these bad things come from this great society. And maybe the great society didn't mean to do that, but that's what it does. And that argument has real power. And it has real power for some of the reasons Julian was mentioning. The New Deal sort of whiffed on issues of racial equality. It cuts black Americans out of some of the most popular programs. FDR is not pushing forward on civil rights. And because Lyndon Johnson does that, it loosens this coalition of white Democrats in both the North and the South for conservatives to send their message to. I think that the other big thing that the Johnson administration does for the conservative movement is that it ushers in a small group, an important group called the neocons, the neoconservatives. And one of the things that the right was having a real problem with in 1965, 1966, is that a lot of Americans saw them as kooks, right? As people who weren't serious, as people who weren't tethered to reality. And now you have this fresh infusion of people who elites admired. And hoops. So these are people like Daniel Bell or Dan Patrick Moynihan. People who were Democrats, who had been good liberals in good standing, who were social scientists and academics. And when they start making a common cause with conservatives against the great society, suddenly elites are taking that criticism more seriously than if it had just been Birchers and people who had voted very goldwater. And to what degree could one say that LBJ helped then to drive and to create this new conservative movement? Because a few minutes ago when we first started, you talked about the conservatives or the GOP that was people like this. And so we're moving along. And Eisenhower's conservatism looked very different than the conservatism that was emerging at this point. And so how was LBJ, to what degree, when we look in retrospect, was he helping to create this new movement? I think Johnson is absolutely critical because it's the opposition to the great society that breathes new life into the right wing in America and that brings new recruits into the conservative movement. The conservative movement of the 1970s versus the conservative movement of the 1950s, it's much more populist in its rhetoric. The great society is presented as this elitist project. And now you have this kind of populist insurgency against it. And that really gives shape both to the social movements on the right in the 1970s, opposition to busing, opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. But it also begins to gather the troops who are going to bring Reagan into office in 1980. And I would also say that another way that LBJ contributes to it, although he's not necessarily behind it, the vote against Barry Goldwater is a vote against Barry Goldwater. It's not always a vote for Lyndon Johnson. And so this front lash that Johnson's people are helping to manufacture to kind of spread the message that Barry Goldwater is a cuckoo, suggests that in the end, when people did vote for LBJ in those extraordinary numbers, the 61% popular vote and the amazing majority's 295 in the House, and it's just, it's not necessarily in support of what Johnson wants to do going whole hog on a great society. It's also a fear of Barry Goldwater so that when you get into 65 and then 66, and the backlash really starts to come, although it's there as Julie mentioned previously, there's a reason for that because in some ways, Johnson's extraordinary success is a little bit of an anomaly and it's his ability to marshal those forces to say, you don't want the other guy and that's also why Johnson is concerned when he does win. I mean, he's morose almost on election night. He's always fearing Bobby Kennedy, of course, and that's out there because Bobby wins too and Bobby's a senator from New York, but Johnson to some extent and he wants reaffirmation of this, recognizes how fragile his victory is and what it ultimately will mean for him and the party. I mean, one of the fascinating things about Johnson for me as I studied him was how cognizant and scared he is of conservatism throughout his presidency, throughout his time in the Senate. I always say that to really understand him, it's the 1952 election that haunts him and kind of the power of conservatism to rear its head is something he's always talking about. He's telling his advisors and there's a quote, I don't think I can curse on stage, but he cursed, it's his quote, but it's in the 65s, they're telling him about the teachings that are taking place, I think at Michigan, the first teaching about Vietnam. And he says, I don't give a, I don't give a shit about, or I don't care about those little shits on the campus, the real beast in this country is the reactionary right. And that haunts him. I think it shapes a lot of his politics. It shapes his desire to be hawkish on the war. He's very scared his coalition's gonna be undercut by the right. He's not as focused on the left. Maybe that was a mistake, but he's always cognizant partly from his time in Texas, partly because he's a creature of Congress. He saw even in the era of Roosevelt, it was the Southern Democrats and the Midwestern Republicans who ruled the roost on Capitol Hill. And so I think if he was here, he would not be surprised that his time was limited and that that right was kind of gonna emerge very quickly. And seed and be the precursor to the right that we have seen evolve and emerge over the last several decades. We've started to do this, but I wanna talk about Johnson in the sweep of American politics. And Julian, starting with you or coming back to you and what he meant to the shaping of the Democratic Party? Well, I mean, the Democratic Party from the 30s on was really built around a very simple idea. It was the value of the federal government, of government to both alleviating the worst elements of our country, kind of the worst swings of the economy and the idea that government could ultimately help solve these problems and make the most of a country that valued independence. You needed government to create that base. And historians like Elizabeth Cohen and Michael Kays and have written about this idea of moral capitalism. They were not, Johnson was not anti-capitalist, Democrats were for a capitalist system, but there had to be a social safety net. There had to be limits to how bad it could get. And that was an important function of government. And in the 60s, Johnson expands that. I think he gets on the side of the movement and that it also has to include more people. That growing middle class of that era, break some of the racial barriers. Not all, as I said, but he was trying to break some down. And so I think that's a heyday of liberalism and what the Democratic Party was ultimately about. And it was rooted in social movements. It really was. It was a party that was very connected to movements from labor to civil rights that were buttressing this idea of what the Democratic Party could be. On the negative, it was also party haunted in my mind by two things. One is this kind of still racial system that was put into place after reconstruction ended. And B, this Cold War mentality where many liberals, many Democrats were scared of making any decision that would make them vulnerable to being weak on defense. And that drove Johnson, it drove the Democrats, it drove the country deep into the jungles of Vietnam. Julian, you referred to the heyday of liberalism. But Mark, I wanna come to you because after Johnson, you've got this long stretch with the exception of Carter where Republicans were winning the White House. But the liberal agenda that Johnson set still continued, still had momentum in life. I mean, taking hits and taking, there were the definite shots and efforts to cut it back to rear it in, rein it in, but it still continued. And I wonder if you can speak to that and what that means for today? Yeah, I think it was transformed as well. I mean, Bill Clinton famously says the era of big government is over. And so that's an acknowledgement that while we still have an interest in doing big things, healthcare, of course, it came after the failure of that, there is still an understanding that the government is to provide some sense of a social safety net for people that the government certainly during the Johnson era was also involved in social justice movements. And a lot of that was simply baked into the fabric of American life after a long time. I mean, to think about an America without Medicare, Medicaid, the immigration reform, doing away with the national origins, on and on education, the dollars. I mean, that's just part of life these days. And so it's really hard to understand what we would be like without those liberal reforms. And of course, liberalism itself becomes a four letter word during that era. So it's tough to claim the liberal mantle, but LBJ lives, right? LBJ is America, the title of the book. And I think in some ways, not necessarily now more than ever, but because of a variety of developments. We're seeing Johnson and his liberal ethos in a new light. The passage of time matters. The Republican Party has changed the critique of liberalism has changed. Johnson's failure in Vietnam doesn't look so much like a personal failure, perhaps as much as an institutional or a national failure after Afghanistan and Iraq. And then as we all know over the last three years with the pandemic, the value of having the government do big things is really, really important. It in many ways alone can marshal the resources, certainly working with the private sector, but to coordinate, it's essential. And so a lot of that story does go back to Lyndon Johnson and it goes back to an activist presidency. And there's a long history to activist presidencies, but the 1960s was really the crucible for that. Kennedy had called the presidency the vital center of the whole scheme of government. And Johnson took that idea and he ran with it and he brought policy into the White Houses, as you would know as well as anybody. But he made the president himself and one day herself so crucial, the president was all things to many people, including as Johnson would show start, I think a trend of the president being the consular in chief. I mean, he is the one we look to after the earthquake in Alaska in 64, Hurricane Betsy down in New Orleans in 65. The federal government is there in a way that previously had been local and state officials. The presidency, the president is gonna be the one who's onsite making sure that people know that the government cares about them. And that's Lyndon Johnson. In our sense today that the government has a constructive role to play in the life of the nation. Yes, of course, a lot of that is FDR and Johnson trying to out FDR, FDR, but it's LBJ himself. And that battle that we talk about with the conservative movement that you've described that is contesting those very points and it is that push and pull and the wrestling that's taking place around that. Nikki, I'm wondering if you can pick up on some of the things that Mark was just talking about. The low stock of Johnson when he dies 50 years ago in 1973 and this new moment that seems to be happening for Lyndon Johnson right now and why you think that's occurring, particularly because there was such an effort to use him as the target, the poster child for all that is wrong with government for many of the reasons that you described. I think that conservatives have a big role to play in why Lyndon Johnson is so popular these days or why he's gained in reputation in part because of the increasingly novel forms of obstruction that the right has used over the past 30 years or so, government shutdowns, fiscal cliff, debt ceiling crises, sequestration, all of these ways that the right has ground government to a halt. And you have people looking around and saying, actually, we want government to be able to do things and wasn't it great back 50 years ago when we had a president who could get things done? And so they look at Johnson and they look at how much legislation he helped shepherd through in those early days of his first full term. And they say, why can't we have someone like him? It's a little bit of magical thinking, right? It suggests that if we just have the right person in the job, they'll be able to break that log jam. And yeah, and has giant majorities. And so I think that's part of it, but I also think that the right has helped out Johnson's reputation by being very effective recently in trying to dismantle the great society, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, the efforts at the state level to reject Medicaid expansion, to potentially reject elementary and secondary school funding, efforts to revise or even throw out the 1965 Immigration Act to shrink immigration back into a quota system that we saw in an earlier era. And as those attacks have mounted and as things like the Voting Rights Act have been effectively killed, people have recognized the value of them, the kinds of protections that the great society has offered for 50 years that maybe they had taken for granted. And now they have to reckon with what they'd actually done and why we want them to stay in effect so much. Don't know what you've got till it's gone. Yep. Curious from each of you, given the conversation we've had, the impact on American political life, the impact on all of our lives, literally every day, the shaping of liberalism, what you think Lyndon Johnson's real legacy is? Julian, wanna start with you. There's every president positive and negative and the positive is obviously remaking the relationship between government and American society in ways that have endured. And anyone who is 65 or older and has their healthcare covered and doesn't have to worry, even with problems that still exist, that the bottom is literally gonna fall out, can look back at the legacy of Lyndon Johnson. And although we're far, far from fixed, I mean, dismantling legal segregation. Unfortunately, the voting rights bill did not last, it lasted for a long time. But all those policies, federal education, policy after policy, that's his legacy in my opinion. That's where he burned all his political capital. And today, those are considered normal parts of American life, even Medicaid, which in 65 wasn't paid attention to, it wasn't a big program, it's turned into a huge part of red states and blue states. But I do think we'd be remiss to say Vietnam is not part of his legacy. It was an utterly disastrous war that also set up some of the tensions we're talking about in terms of distrusting the very government he helped build. And one of the legacies, we have another author, Fred Logoval, he's written a lot about this. It's the consequences of presidential choices. And decisions that elected officials make have huge impacts. And when you get it wrong, and when you get it really wrong, that becomes part of your legacy. And I always say, you can't say there's the great society, but there's also, it's the same person. It's often the same political logic. And so I think both remain part of his legacy. But because of the tapes, he also remains someone that brings us back to studying the presidency and thinking about it, whether you loved him or hated him, but that is a value. He is one of the most captivating people. American culture loves, like thinking about him all the way is a great example, Robert Caro's books. There's just something there that allows us to think about government and governing, which is important in an age when both of those are treated as secondary or something that's bad. I mean, Hoover didn't get a play on Broadway. Right. Yeah, he did. Mark. Yeah, I think Julia nailed it, both the positive and the negative. And we were talking about who you would put on Mount Rushmore or if you had to build a new Mount Rushmore, who would you want on there? And I'd want Lyndon Johnson on there, but I'd want him in profile, right? I'd want half his head kind of buried in the rock. And we know what that half would be, and it would be Vietnam for all the reasons that Julian highlighted because of the distrust in government because of the credibility gap that he engendered. And when we're talking about that, keep in mind what people's relationship was with their government prior to Vietnam. You had just extraordinary numbers believing that the government did the right thing most of the time. And that's just not the case by the end of the 1960s. And it's under Johnson that the term credibility gap grows. And the more that we found out at the time because there were hearings on the Tonkin Gulf, 1968, it became clear that the first attack happened, but the second attack in August of 64 probably did not happen. And did we go to war on this false pretext? And then you fast forward to maybe 2003 and think about that. And there are all kinds of concerns about the way that the government can play fast and lose with the truth and it creates this sense of disbelief and alienation and distrust, and that's corrosive. And that's part of Johnson's legacy too. So yes, we have Richard Nixon to thank as well for Watergate, but the ball really starts to get going kind of in a contemporaneous way. We would find out about JFK later on, but in a contemporaneous way with LBJ. And of course the lives lost. And of course the 58,000, and not only the 58,000, but the 3 million in Indochina as well, right. Nikki, give you the last word on this. Lyndon Johnson was the first president to govern when the US had the infrastructure for an inclusive multiracial democracy. That democracy is only 60 years old and he helped to create the infrastructure for that inclusive democracy. And at a moment when a lot of Americans are worried about the future of democracy and trying to figure out what we have, what we lost, and what we want, I think that story has to start in many ways with Lyndon Johnson. And his legacy is shaping those debates to this day. The folks who are arguing that we need to have that kind of democracy have to trace it back to Johnson. And that's a pretty powerful legacy. It wasn't his idea. He wasn't the only person responsible for it, but he was president and he helped put that infrastructure in place. And I think that's a pretty powerful legacy. Well, we will leave it at that. Remember when we started and I told you all I was thrilled and excited to be here? I think you now know why. Please join me in thanking this wonderful panel.